[Foundation-l] Re: Vote to create Wikiversity 2 sides

Tue Nov 8 11:36:50 UTC 2005

On 11/8/05, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In response to the idea that Wikiversity as a learning community might
> compete with, or preclude partnerships with, existing educational
> projects :
>
> What impresses me most about Wikimedia is not the growing content
> repository, but the growing body of knowledge-seekers who write to,
> teach and learn from one another, all about and through free
> knowledge. A large community of people with whom I can geek out about
> best practices for writing bios on forgotten mathematicians, or the
> kind of information to include in the history of a hurricane season,
> or how to distinguish languages from dialects, or how to distinguish
> environmental science from environmental politics.
>
> Wikipedia is *already* a teaching and learning community. It is not a
> community of savants who fit in a few hours of transcription and
> writing into their weeks. One of its regular services is facilitating
> the teaching of passionate people how to become better writers, how to
> remove bias from their observations, how to argue logically with
> others, how to produce quality translations.
>
> I imagine that a Wikiversity would be founded in teaching without
> teachers, and certainly without thought given to accreditation of
> either instructors or degrees -- but instead founded in
> a) identifying fields, courses, and syllabi
> b) gathering up free texts, cheatsheets, problem sets, exams, and
> other materials
> c) facilitating groups of interested students -- at many levels of
> knowledge and teaching experience -- who want to learn together, form
> study and reading groups, and teach one another.
> d) bringing together interested educators and related programs
> worldwide, to contribute ideas and content, try out new teaching
> methods via wikis, and more.
>
> Adding new software functionality, while always a lovely thing to do
> (software can do anything, after all :) could come after everything
> else on this list.
>
> This would not be "e-learning" in the trademarked (sic) sense. This
> would be unlike every big online educational project to date. For one
> thing, it would naturally scale without assigned 'staff' and related
> overhead. For another, I know educators who dearly hope to see
> someone try out this such a student-to-student learning project; and I
> know of no major initiatives with which such a project would compete
> (if they exist, I would love to learn of them!).
>
> ++SJ

You say that "Wikipedia is *already* a teaching and learning community." And
you're right, it is. But I think it's significant that the community isn't
the purpose of the project, building an encyclopedia is.

Likewise, I believe if a project is started to create e-learning materials,
I think it's natural that some people will use that project to organize
self-study courses and maybe even to discuss more traditional courses. I
don't think we should stop them, and the organization of self-study courses
pretty much falls under the creation of e-learning materials anyway.

In fact, if essentially what you just wrote was what was on the project page
when I read it, I would have gotten a completely different picture of what
the project was. Looking back I see it in parts of the description. I wonder
if maybe the name of the project could be reconsidered to better portray
this goal. That would have pros and cons, though.

Anyway, if votes still matter, you can count mine as a yes I guess.